Date: Fri, 5 Jun 92 19:53:52 +0200
From: jfg@dxcern.cern.ch (Jean Francois Groff)
Message-Id: <9206051753.AA03322@dxcern.cern.ch>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: HTML and bitmaps
One more comment on this:
> (I think the WWW protocols would require that the data be uuencoded,
> since I don't think they will allow 8bit data)
WWW can inherently use several protocols to fetch data. Some of them
may be limited to 7-bit characters, but the WWW architecture itself is
designed with full 8-bit bytes. In particular, the HTTP protocol that
we have defined supports 8-bit data. However, HTML, our language for
describing hypertext, is based on SGML which is essentially a 7-bit
construct (actually, it can only handle a predefined set of characters).
Your impression may come from the fact that in the current
implementation, as HTTP can only return HTML documents, the
distinction between them is not clear. The new phase of HTTP that we
are currently designing will be able to handle documents of arbitrary
types. These documents are then processed by the client program
depending on its own capabilities, with the possible help of external
converters or applications, much like the Xwais.filters stuff.
--
Jean-Francois Groff (jfg@info.cern.ch)
World-Wide Web initiative
CERN, ECP division, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
Phone +41 22 767 3755 -- Fax +41 22 767 7155
--
Engineers think that theory approximates reality. | Mathematicians never
Physicists think that reality approximates theory. | make the connection.